I know what Omawusi would say. Allow me to introduce you to her. She is a nurse in Ward 31 of the Middlemore Hospital – the Cardiac Ward. I met her during my stay in the Ward after my stroke in 2023. The change of shift for the new nurses had come to relieve the ones who had been looking after me overnight. The charge nurse was introducing all of the ladies to me and she mentioned Omawusi’s name as she went down the line of nurses. She was clearly African and had an intriguing name. I heard it clearly and when I talked with her a short time later I used her name. She was surprised and said, “Oh my God, you got my name right. No one here pronounces my name correctly. But you heard it minutes ago and said it perfectly. How did you do that?”
I asked Omawusi where she came from and she said, “Yoruba.”
My next question was “Did you live in Lagos, Nigeria?”
Again she was shocked and asked, “How did you know that?”
I replied, “I know the Yoruba are the predominant tribe in the South of Nigeria along the coast. The Hausa are in the central area and the Igbo are in the North Eastern corner and the Fulani are the nomadic pastoralists in the North.”
She asked, “How did you know all of that about my country? Most people here know nothing about my country.”
I told her, “I was a Geography teacher in High School here in New Zealand and taught the senior school Nigerian physical geography and the influence on settlement patterns. Now I work with Wycliffe Bible Translators and am aware of the distribution of the tribes and languages in a number of countries of Africa and elsewhere.”
Omawusi didn’t regard herself as Nigerian. She didn’t classify herself after the name of her country. Rather, of highest importance to her, she was from the Yoruba tribe.